Expert's Rating

OVERALL

Price when reviewed

£219 inc VAT

Low-cost colour laser printers such as the £219 HP LaserJet Pro 200 Colour Printer M251nw are tempting for small-office users who see laser technology as familiar and reliable (never mind that in this price range, a small-office inkjet printer is a much better deal). Unfortunately, colour laser models in this price range tend to be slow and sparsely featured, with expensive toner. The M251nw sticks to that trend, but it also offers some innovative features and better-than-usual image quality. Still not cheap enough for you? The Dell C1660w has an even lower price tag and even better output quality, but it's a lot slower and has pricier toner. See also: Group test: what's the best printer?

On looks alone, the HP LaserJet Pro 200 Colour Printer M251nw could win a lot of fans. With a faux brushed-black-metal exterior (it's plastic, but convincing), and a flip-up, 3.5-inch touchscreen control panel, it's one of the handsomest small office laser printers to come down the pike in a while.

The HP LaserJet Pro 200 Colour Printer M251nw features all of the three major connection technologies: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB. We installed using Wi-Fi with minimum fuss. There's both Wi-Fi Protected Setup and the standard setup wizard. HP's ePrint cloud-printing services are another bonus, including features like remote printing via e-mail and access to Web-based apps and services.

Paper handling features consist of a 150-sheet paper tray on the bottom of the unit, and an integrated 125-sheet output bin on the top--the classic small laser setup. Duplexing is manual, with step-by-step, onscreen prompts.

HP LaserJet Pro 200 Colour Printer M251nw: High cost per page

The cost per page for consumables with the M251nw is unfortunately quite high, even compared to most entry-level inkjets. The standard 1600-page black cartridge costs £56, for a per-page cost of about 3.5p. The cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges last for 1800 pages and cost £65 apiece (3.6p per colour, per page), so add 10.8p for them. A total of 14.3p per four-colour page is not a bargain. You can reduce that slightly with the 2400-page, £69 XL black cartridge to 3.3p per black page and 14p per four-colour page. There are no high-yield colour toners. The printer ships with 700-page, starter-size supplies of all four colors.

Its pages may cost a lot, but the M251nw will give your SOHO correspondence a more professional look than an inkjet. Text is super-sharp, and monochrome graphics are smooth and even. colour graphics are also very good for a laser, though slightly on the cool and dark side. There were noticeable defects in the more difficult areas of our brightly lit group photo, mostly in dark patterns and faces. Non-human subjects generally looked quite nice.

The M251nw printed text and mixed-text and monochrome graphics pages at an aggregate 9.2 pages per minute (ppm) on the PC and 8.6 on the Mac. That's decently fast considering the unit's small volume design and low price. It was fast with 4-by-6-inch snapshots, printing them to plain paper in 20 seconds (3 ppm) and glossy paper in about double the time. A full-page photo printed on the Mac took 70 seconds, or 0.8 pages per minute.

The M251nw carries a one-year warranty and is recommended for light-volume use of 250 to 1500 pages a month. That's a real-life rating, not the fantastic duty-cycle numbers that vendors often provide. We'd love to steer you to a version of this printer that has automatic duplexing, but you seemingly can't get that until you shop the LaserJet Pro 400 models.

HP LaserJet Pro 200 Colour Printer M251nw: One of the best choices in this price range

Expensive toner and the lack of two-sided printing are typical deficiencies among low-priced colour laser printers. While they can add to the cost of ownership, our tests with inkjets show that light-volume users may not feel the ink or toner pinch for some time. Given all that, the HP LaserJet Pro 200 Colour Printer M251nw is one of the best choices in its class, because of its good output quality, connectivity, and ease of use.

OUR VERDICT

The HP LaserJet Pro 200 Colour Printer M251nw offers good colour output quality and connectivity with an easy-to-use touchscreen control panel. Unfortunately the toner is pricey and there is no automatic two-sided printing. If you are in the market for a cheap colour laser printer this is about as good as it gets. But you may wish to consider an inkjet if your initial budget is constrained.

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Comments

Jerry G. said: Comments,Jerry G.,This printer being a 600 dpi laser color printer, I would assume the photo quality would be about the same as the other 600 dpi color printers or at least close...As for the cost of operation, in my way of thinking, most likely I would assume there is more works in the cartridges to make up for the lower cost of the printer system (shell) itself.For casual color printing, I am under the impression it is a fairly good printer. I would not use a printer like this for high volume printing.As for double sided printing, in reading the instruction manual it is possible but manually done. After setting up for double sided printing in the menu and the first side is printed, the paper has to be put back in to the paper load tray with the printed side flipped down. (If I recall correctly)... Consult the user manual for details.Over the years I have had desktop laser printers. When I was required to do a double sided print I had to use a similar process as for the above.I have not used a dot matrix printer since about the year 1998. I have been using HP laser printers ever since.